The Unveiling of Original Mother Photos

Interview with Newtopia Magazine

http://newtopiamagazine.wordpress.com/2011/12/14/newartlab-interview-with-sculptor-gesso-cocteau-on-her-original-mother/

Interview with Gesso Cocteau

When in your life did you realize the art life was for you and how did that materialize in your being?

I grew up surrounded by creative people. My Mother loved books and so we had a library of every great classic and some very old first edition rare books. My Father loved to draw and play harmonica. We had poetry readings after school in our great room and since our house was the big house by the ocean we always had relatives staying with us. One of my Aunts was a painter and a sculptor. She use to make dolls out of doilies and pipe cleaners and create environments for the dolls to live. She painted the ocean over and over again and would tell me if you found one great subject that moved you and possessed you that was all the inspiration you needed. So I found the human body in an old Loomis book when I was in my early teens and decided that would be my passion and my inspiration. I have changed mediums throughout my career, starting with graphite, to acrylics and oils, to fabricated steel to cast bronze, but the human body has always been my most significant subject.

Who were your earliest influences and what attracted you to them?

Andre Loomis was my first influence, the  book ‘Figure Drawing For All It’s Worth’, which I think is out of print now was my Bible from thirteen through my twenties. Also George B Bridgman whose books were invaluable to me during my twenties and thirties. William Rimmer and Burne Hogarth were also early influences on my style of figure drawing when I was young. During this time I also fell in love with drawing super hero’s and would fill sketch pads with The Joker, Nick Fury and The Silver Surfer. So I was very influenced by Jack Kirby and Bob Kane-I also look back and think that I was influenced by growing up in a liberal Southern California beach city. The lightness of being, the buoyancy of movement and the liberal expression of passion.

What were your earliest pieces of work?

In my early twenties I worked in graphite doing portraits of immigrant workers. I lived in a Volkswagon van for four years during the summer and followed the fruit workers starting in California with cherries and ending up in the fall picking apples in Washington. We would sit by campfire at night and with a miners flashlight on my head and pencils I would draw the portraits of my migrant worker friends. At this time I was also doing sculpture with found wood. When I was in my mid twenties I applied to a studio on the Big Island of Hawaii to study with Bill Hilbert, who had been a special effects technician for a major Movie Studio and was now running an art studio designing high-end signs and sculptural designs. After being accepted to apprentice under Bill I began a seven day a week regiment of design, painting and sculpting. During this time I was still working on my graphite technique and creating my own Super Heroes. I returned to Los Angeles in my late twenties and began doing large scale head portraits of super heroes, monsters and erotica. I had just finished a collection of monsters and medieval dragons which consisted of sixteen life size drawings and were all purchased by a collector who was building a castle in Northridge California. I was also showing my life size graphite heads in various galleries throughout California.

How did you come to the sculpture form and why did you realize this was the course for you?

In my early thirties I moved to the desert of California. At the time I was working in gauche, graphite and pen mostly on canvas. I took a job as an assistant to a sculptor and at the same time took up welding so I could begin a series of fabricated steel. After spending five years welding I decided I wanted to concentrate on cast bronze. The man who had bought my graphite series of monsters and dragons commissioned a monumental size Dragon so this became a gateway to my passion. I had developed a relationship with a foundry in Northern California, I still work with the same team now that I did twenty years ago which started with my Dragon. After the install of that sculpture I produced an ongoing body of work consisting of tabletop to life size sculptures representing relationships which became my main theme of work up until I was commissioned to do the fifty one foot Endless Celebration.

After the installation of Endless Celebration I took some time off to contemplate my direction. I had always been inspired by poets, especially the romantics, but during this time I began to think about my life, not just the sensations of it but the meaning and I found that the revelations of my deepest desires and hope were surfacing. I realized that my body of work not only represented relationships, but I now saw that all of my desires and fears, potentialities and conflicts, almost all of the fabric of my own human will was psychologically imprinted in my bronzes. The one thing this time of thought did for me was to concretize my passion for the vehicle of clay and the medium of cast bronze.

In your current body of work, what are the key elements that you express and what is overall conveyed through your artistic vision?

Oppositions, contradictions and balance.

Love, Music, Introspection and themes reflecting the human spirit.

My work can raise as many question as it can answer.

I think it is dangerous for an artist to overstate her artistic vision, it leaves little room for the viewer to have an authentic reaction.

What concepts enthrall you that work there way out in your art? Overall themes and sub-themes…

The themes of myths. Relationships,. Between people, between people and music..The realm of Warrior Angels, Introspection, myth fashion and love. I am especially interested in the Mother Archetype. This idea consumed me for three years as I worked on my sculpture ‘The Original Mother’. I love the idea of the different aspects of this archetype, as Jung wrote: “These are three essential aspects of the mother: her cherishing and nourishing goodness, her orgiastic emotionality and her stygian depths.”

The idea that we are only who we tell ourselves we are has always fascinated me and I think in some ways I am sculpting my own story, my own personal mythology. I have a very complicated relationship with my own Mother and after fifty -seven years I still do not understand it, nor does she. I think our identification with the Mother archetype goes deep into our cellular memory of the first women and it is hard to reconcile with a personal theory of who our Mothers are until we understand who we are.

How did the messengers of hope come to you and describe their birth and what they’ve come to mean?

You are referring to the large warrior angels Messenger of Hope and Guardian Angel?

The idea came to me after reading Rilke’s ‘Duino Elegies’.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic

Orders? And even if one were to suddenly

take me to its heart, I would vanish into its

stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but

the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear,

and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains

to destroy us. Every Angel is terror.

There was something so raw and beautiful about an angel who does not fit the prescribed appearance. The word ‘angel’ comes from the Greek word angelos, which is a translation of the Hebrew word mal’akh, meaning ‘messenger’, a being that carries messages between the human world and some other realm or realms of existence. I thought to myself of course they will look somewhat terrifying they are able to transport from creation to destruction and back to creation and they carry the hope of reconciliation. They are messengers that allow us a greater understanding and connection to our Spirit

I think I intended these beings as messengers of hope, protection and compassion. They are not perfect, but flawed in texture and proportion revealing the torment and suffering that they take away and exchange for protection, love, hope and social justice. I wanted them to be bold, powerful and humble at the same time.

I still do not think I have grasped the full meaning of why I did these sculptures. I often find it takes years of living with a piece before you find the motivation that stirred you into creating.

How is our personal studio space conducive to you creativity and what elements do you find essential to your process of creation?

I have experienced different spaces for over thirty five years, from large industrial to home studios and I find what works best for me is my home. Of course the entire house except the bedroom becomes my studio, but my cats and husband do not seem to mind. What is necessary to me to create is an environment of freedom. If I want to work until the morning hours my bed is always only a few feet away, also I have my best friend to bounce ideas off, my cats to take breaks with and the freedom to engage in my books at any time. It just works for me. I have always been accused of being the cleanest sculptor in the world. Yes, I like a clean uncluttered space and I realize that is not popular in the mythology of artist. But it is my way. I have to have order and cleanliness in my studio, this does not translate into my bedroom, but there is something about working without clutter that helps me concentrate and do my best work. I guess I have a bit of an Obsessive Compulsive Behavior.

How does your garden and nature influence your work and life as an artist?

I always think about my garden in the realm of what is beneath the soil and what grows downward and then what is on top of the soil and growing upward.

I see a hawk on top of the highest branch of my pepper tree and a mouse gnawing at the roots. It is the same with my work, what is beneath the bronze, what starts with the clay, the roots of the piece and what branches upward: this is the poetry of the piece once it is cast into bronze. Also it lightens my heaviness when I can be more involved with the earth. It influences my bones and my soul knowing that someday I will return to the soil. I think there is something very beautiful about the human flesh returning to the flesh of the earth.

What does being an artist in today’s world mean to you? Do you feel a sense of personal responsibility with what you put out into the world?

I don’t think of being an artist much different than being anything else. This is the life that was afforded to me, I don’t know any other life. It means that I am the story I told myself when I was a young girl and saw Vincent Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ for the first time. A witness like so many before me of the night sky filled with swirling clouds, the crescent moon on fire, the village below the rolling mountains, the colors alive with energy

I have tried to persuade myself from time to time that I have a sense of responsibility being an artist, but it really isn’t about that for me, it is about the poetry of the moment when something touches my bones and I feel the need to translate this feeling into something tactile.

What do you think artists contribute to today’s world and collective consciousness and unconsciousness?

I think as artist we continue to tell the great themes of myth through our vision.

Anything else to add about being a woman artist?

Not an obstacle and not an advantage….

Gesso’s Online Catalogue

http://issuu.com/gessococteau/docs/gesso_cocteau_2011

“Original Mother intends to tell a story…

Kimberly Nichols read all of my notes and journal entries as I was working on Original Mother and wrote the following:

Original Mother

Original Mother represents the initial seed of all humanity that, when coupled with our myriad lineages across eons of social, political and chronological history, takes us back to that universally common abstract moment of life’s first true spark upon this earth. The place, relative to us all, where existence burst forth, that although has been communally washed away in the psyche by time, cannot be denied its presence in our blood, bones and flesh.

As if unearthed from the ground, she carries a ruddy exterior reminiscent of mud, dirt and primal matter, layered in meticulously applied custom patinas and stains, denoting the relationship of erosion juxtaposed against timeless survival and the dance between terra firma and animate existence. Arms around her legs, she sits in quiet meditation, revealed and repositioned amidst all the complexities, ambiguities and contradictions of being human.

Two faces grace Original Mother. One is soothing and conjures the womb while the other gazes solidly at the viewer provoking profound inner reflection surrounding one’s place on this earth. The unconditional gazes of the mother, holding space for the potential of self-individuation and realization as we stand in the wake of worldly experience. She is curious, yet without judgment.

The markings on Original Mother represent a corporeal energy, an unconscious instinctive force. A pronounced spine carries upon it a metamorphosis of symbols culled from every era, culture, religion and esoteric sect, rendering all indistinguishable yet inherently familiar and homogenous.

At the intersection of pelvis and gut, lies her Kundalini energy; the sleeping, dormant potential force of the human organism.

Conceptually, the diamond (made from our infrastructural carbon building block) on the top of her head evokes clarity, ascension and wisdom.

A symbol of our universal matrilineal ancestry, more ancient then the mitochondrial Eve; pre-Christ, Mohammed or Abraham, she educes a cultural respect for life in its very presence, stripped of the ego’s illusions as mater matura or “mother of the first dawn.”

Original Mother intends to tell a story of resurrection celebration, as an icon, sharing the elixir of belonging and the merging of the spiritual and material worlds.

To observe the Original Mother is to expose all of our inner questioning and to be open to a direct, visual dialogue with our ancient cellular memory.

Fallen Angels

Fragment of thoughts after the death of a young artist….

“Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

One of the lessons I have learned about life is that the sooner we can get rid of believing there is any solid ground beneath our feet the better we can navigate our life and art. You never quite get it all together, there is no safety net and it is futile to continuously seek pleasure and try to avoid pain. There is nowhere to hide. There is no salvation from us. I believe that artist are like explorers, we are seduced by new ideas and passion, we are curious and often times obsessed with our own tortured talent. At times our curiosity is larger than our courage to actually face the ideas that delight us. It is the curse of an artist to desire ethereal perfection. Life is upward and downward and the emotional view is always changing from joy, to sadness, voluptuousness to emaciated. It is the taunting ambiguity of brilliance that can vaporize our lives if we do not wear wings, which can stand the glare of such intense heat. Time and death have no place in the heart of artist; we are consumed with our own confessions of wanting, dreaming hoping and creating. But once in awhile when we loose a great talent so young, an artist who is held captive by opiated dreams and bored with modern life we witness the myth of a tortured artist incarnate. The ‘live fast die young’ story is too often about the tail of the comet streaking through time like a fire of light beckoning to the depths of space with their incandescence. They dare the rest of us to take notice.  They become the fallen angels exiled from earth. R.I.P Amy…..

Final Notes to Myself on Original Mother

Original Mother

Final Notes to Myself:

June 24^th 2011

The flesh was meant to depict an exchange of soil into life and life back to the earth. Descending from the human to the mineral world and then a resurrection from terra firma to animate existence, the adaptation to environment: rising up from inorganic material to breath.

Original Mother was intended to help raise awareness of humanity by her visual narrative, reminding us to step outside of ourselves and view the larger picture.

If, as artist we are conceived as vessels, hollow conduits for the divine to flow through then certainly the journey of Original Mother carved me out to the zero emptiness of the Zen state. Ideas come from emotions beyond words, from our soulfulness.

Original Mother was intended to tell a story of resurrection celebration, sharing the elixir of belonging and the merging of two worlds.

She is a symbol of realization; behind the mask of conscious experience there is an abstract ancestor.  The mythology of Original Mother is psychological. She is pointing the way to our origins, to how we have all evolved from the same beginning. She is the initiator of our psyches, to realize how we fit together in the cord of humanity. When we accept all people as one family we are guided through life with more enrichment and realization. Our world is in need of unification symbols and icons, visualizations that unite people and heal our fractured communities.

Original Mother’s wings symbolize an effort to rise above ground and reach for higher ideals, a spiritual flight. They are flawed and scarred, yet one can tell by their battered textures that they have been used countless times, perhaps it is simply the metaphor of wings which are needed to represent or suggest that freedom is possible, that our lives can carry us upward and forward, but not without becoming twisted and blemished. Not without battles. As we all can learn from Original Mother there has to be a sacrifice for transformation. The two faces suggest we live in two worlds at the same time. One world of awakening and one of sleep. One world above ground and one below. We have our eyes open while conscious, our eyes closed when we enter our dream lives. Both are necessary. The faces represent the relationship between destruction and creation and death and rebirth. Original Mother wears a guttural texture. I was not trying to achieve a form of perfection with this sculpture as “perfection rapes the soul”.

The markings on Original Mother represent a corporeal energy, an unconscious instinctive force. I chose to bring attention to the spine of Original Mother because of the many myths and symbols, which are contained in this part of the anatomy.  Kundalini energy is described as being a sleeping, dormant potential force in the human organism. Accentuating this area of my sculpture was an attempt to suggest an awakening and uprising. Once again to come from the earth, to rise up and become conscious and with this the social responsibility to help one another, to place emphasis on the power of loving and healing.

The carved shapes on Original Mother have occurred in every era, culture, religion and esoteric sect. They are an abstract language recognized by all peoples. The diamond on the top of her head is clearly s symbol of clarity, ascension and wisdom. Diamonds are made from carbon, which is a foundational building block of matter. The diamond symbol is synonymous with refracting light. Original Mother is in the process of refracting her light to others. She has come from beneath with ancient wisdom to share with modern generations. Her feet are planted firmly in the mud of earth and at the top of her skull is the beacon of the invincible and the hope for our future. Love one another. May we all return to our roots, our homeland and take with us symbols of unification. May we weld back together that which has been fractured.

Original Mother Returns

…A page from my journal on Original Mother.
Today Original Mother returned to my studio cast in bronze and imbued with soul. My expectations for a unification symbol translated into a physical form. This year of my life is turning into tremendous energy and change. Perhaps the year 57 holds power and compassion in the cradle of somewhere between young and old. The chasing tools and pencils, the clay, the armatures, paper and poetry keep churning, sweet bird of change beneath a falling star. Original Mother has become this allegory in my life: fertility, birth, death and rebirth, the elements of life. My miraculous resurrection from the mundane to the glorious. Divine heroes buried beneath the temptation of reconciliation, the realization that there is no gift in settling. Original Mother has been a gift to myself on many levels all of which point to the primordial urge to remember where I came from and how I fit into the terrain of my own belief system. Original Mother has grounded me and at the same time provided me with a great wing span to soar and fall and not to fear flying too close to the brightness or the heat. Original Mother gave my sorrow when my Father died a platform, an energy field to open a dialogue with myself about life and death and the thread of a common background we all share. As sure as we are living and breathing we will die one day, our protective flesh will peel away and rot, our souls exposed to what we have believed will either rise up and move forward or become deafened by the anxiety of change and lie still. Either way we will have had our experience as humans. Something we all share, a common thread that will always unite us, what fractures us is falling away from remembering our true heritage. Original Mother is a reminder of all that we experience as humans, the commonalities we inhabit, the memory of roots that lead back to one idea, we are in this grid together, we are not separated just because certain belief systems rupture our vision of who we are as ‘one people’. We are HUMANS, the difference make up much less than the sum of our DNA. Original Mother is a reminder that we all return to the primordial womb of Earth. Original Mother is the ‘material prima’ churning in the alchemical process of regeneration. Pictures to be posted in the fall of OM. If you are interested in a private viewing contact Kimberly Nichols by e mail on the home page of this website.

Original Mother

For the last two years I have been working on a sculpture called Original Mother. I recently finisher her but will not be posting any pictures for a couple of months. If you are reading this and you are interested in seeing pictures please e mail me. This has been the most incredible journey of my life. Many thanks  to Carl for his undying enthusiasm for this project, his unstoppable problem solving and motivational pep talks. His love and support and his incredible suggestions and participation. Many thanks to Allen, Lisa, John and Alfonso for taking the ride with me and to my Dad who I know watches everything I do with compassion and love. Below is the narrative for Original Mother.

Art is respondent by emotion.

When I first conceptualized The Original Mother I was asking the all-inclusive question, “Where do we come from?” This has been one of the paramount questions asked by humans for thousands of years. Although the question itself provokes numerous levels of thought, my idea in asking was not to segregate orfracture my answer by seeking organized religion solutions, but to have a discusion with myself about The Original Mother, and by wondering who she was in a pre argument, pre organized religion realm.

I thought The Original Mother theme could be a solution to getting beyond racism and understanding that we all come from a common thread of ‘being human’. I contemplated how this could be an effective use of stimulating thought through this sculpture, a vision or path of reconciliation and healing, developing ideas of a culture grounded in consciousness of a mutual respect for life.

I also started to think about how people live in isolation, not feeling rooted to an ancestral homeland. I felt there could be a powerful message in a body of work representing a symbolic ‘Diaspora’ a migration or movement of a group of people away from an established homeland. Exile. To eventually accompany the Original Mother will be First Father and two children. The children will represent the fracturing of alliance as they leave their homeland only to return once they comprehend wholeness and belonging.

The first family will tell a story of Diaspora, a mythic exodus out of the garden into the wilderness and then home again. What welds the fracture back to wholeness and allows the children to come home again is the realization and understanding of our common ancestry.

The world is a diverse place this is part of the separation that we feel.  People come in different shapes and appearances, yet the genetic structure is not so different. Over 99% of the DNA in all people is identical. The remaining one percent is what accounts for our dissimilarity.

Somewhere down the line of history, we are all related. Our ancestors appear to blend into a single woman, who lived on the African savannah 150,000to 200,000 years ago. I like to imagine that the groupings of people that we refer to as races are all the same species, Homo sapiens.  We are the product of four billion years of evolutionary processes.  The Original Mother represents the oneness of human existence.  She is the mythic image of the feminine principal. Our human alcove emphasizes brains over brawn; this is what gives us creativity and language, art and poetry, curiosity and social interaction. The Original Mother is a cellular memory, which I think we all have. She is a symbol of healing and unifying, the unification of mind, matter, soul and body, thinking and feeling intellect and intuition, reason and instinct. The Original Mother becomes a valid expression of the sanctity and unity of life. Not as a personalized image but a universal emblem a vision of life as a sacred whole in which all humanity is represented.

As an artist I am aware of the urgent need to comprehend the world as a unity. I have conceptualized The Original Mother to be the primal source of all humans. Mythic images are important on so many levels. Symbols and icons radically influence us both in our personal and in our collective life. If concurrent forces shape the cultivation of human culture than feral anthropology is scripted in ancient symbols all over The Original Mother. She is the aperture of human evolution.

We are all trying to find our place, to find justification for our experiences and to explain our brief stay upon the earth. To observe the Original Mother is to expose all of our inner questioning and to be open to a direct, visual dialogue with our ancient cellular memory.

While nicknaming The Original Mother ‘OM ‘I realized that her abbreviated name is the most important and significant word of Mantra tradition. It is considered as the root Mantra.

OM is the most often chanted sound among all the sacred sounds on earth. OM is said to be the original primordial creative sound from which the entire universe have manifested.

Om is the sound, which is not the result of the striking of two objects. It emanates on its own. It is the primal sound of the universe that contains all sounds in it.

Once again unity is the theme.

For as long as people have existed we have struggled to know where we come from, to discover and define a universal truth. It is a personal journey with landmarks along the way. The journey is almost always plagued with hardships and also filled with an ineffable joy. But we are all in the grid together; despite our differences we do all share a common ancestry. Within this human tapestry I offer The Original Mother, a sculpture of unification.

Gesso Cocteau 2011

Personal Journey

I

I began making bronze sculpture as a way to reflect my own life’s journey. There is always a correlation between my individual sculptures and what is happening in my life. My work is like a personal journal, in a sense that the work resolves or characterizes my experiences. I have made sculptures to resolve a problem or to chronicle my joy and despair. Most evident in my work are relationships that I have experienced or observed. I am motivated by the absolute truth of the body’s posture. Since gestures are, for the most part, learned before any type of language is acquired and the non-verbal movement of the body never lies, there is honesty to this instinctive physical vocabulary. I believe there is an emotional equivalent to every physical gesture of the flesh. My sculptures display bodies conveying their own range of feelings in the forms of lovers and musicians to angels and bodies coded with expressions of introspection.The language of my sculpture contains my thoughts, my reactions, my perceptions, and the way that I process my life. They are also shadows and left over residue of a time in my own personal history. I think of my sculpture as ‘social sculpture’ with a universal narrative, emotions we all have in common. My sculptures are the faceless nature of non-verbal communication reflecting the human spirit.